Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last ten years, you’ll know that WAG is short for ‘wives and girlfriends’, a rather snide way of referring to the partners of professional footballers. And now there’s a musical all about them: their designer clothes, cosmetic enhancements and tedious attempts at chicanery.

The story is the work of Belvedere Pashun, whose biog in the programme describes him as ‘a keen aurelian’. I admit I had to look the word up: an aurelian is a collector and breeder of insects. Whether this is an obvious qualification for conceiving a musical I’m not sure, but Pashun has teamed up with Grant Martin, Thomas Giron-Towers and Tony Bayliss to create something that’s more creepy than crawly.

The show focuses on shop assistants Jenny and Sharron. Their jobs on a cosmetics counter bring them into contact with plenty of WAGs – among them the awful Zoe and Vicci, played by two women who have themselves been labelled WAGs, Lizzie Cundy and Pippa Fulton. The girls’ hopes and anxieties are at the heart of a piece that seems to assume a woman can only be fulfilled through a relationship with a man.

It’s not often that you hear the word ‘affection’ rhymed with ‘erection’, but that’s the kind of show this is. Early on one of the more likeable characters – not that there are many – informs us that men aren’t that fussed what a woman’s face is like so long as she has a tight… well, you can guess the rest.

There are some small positives. Daisy Wood-Davis imparts real vigour to Jenny, and a couple of the songs are catchy. But this is a charmless, predictable and depressingly sexist confection.